Urth Digest, Vol 57, Issue 13

David Stockhoff · 17 May 2009, 13:56 · from 2009-May.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 09:56:18 -0400
Subject: (urth) Urth Digest, Vol 57, Issue 13
In-Reply-To: <mailman.65695.1242564095.12296.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
References: <mailman.65695.1242564095.12296.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <4A101782.6070904 at verizon.net>

All of which is perfectly correct but has little to do with actual socialism and more to do with paranoid Randian fantasies of it. In short, a straw man.

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Message: 3
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 06:24:36 -0500
From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Urth Digest, Vol 57, Issue 13
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <4A0FF3F4.70602 at io.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Robin Dunn wrote:

> > But revolution comes when that
> > rich/ poor gap gets too high.  And revolutions have very, very high
> > costs.  Wolfe knows that too, I bet.
>   

There's more to it, like how poor the poor are to begin with, than how 
far the rich are above them. The Lydians didn't revolt against Croesus, 
after all.

Socialism needs to borrow more from communalism before it has enough of 
a chance to be worth a trial. An adversarial system that where many 
have-nots stand to gain at the expense of a few haves by definition is 
going to be opposed by all the wealth and power the haves can bring to 
bear. If you can arrange things so that Capital gets a return, even a 
modest one, as well as Labor, then you'll get some takers among the haves.

-- Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com < http://www.io.com/~jwilson > 
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